


This Is A Bad Plan

by ProwlingThunder



Category: Sword Art Online
Genre: Constant Lvl 2 Pain mod, Deathgame, Gen, Real Life, Self Inserts, VR Gaming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 05:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3434768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Prowling Thunder wanted to do was play the game. VRMMO? Sure, why not. She was good at MMOs...</p><p>Get stuck with nearly her entire friendbase? That's okay, but it wasn't really the plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Creation

**Author's Note:**

> This is a SELF INSERT story about a group of online friends getting stuck in a REAL LIFE version of SWORD ART ONLINE.

On the list of calculated percentages of terrible things, she didn't actually consider it above or below the second set of seven. There was a greater risk of death from skydiving, which actually _was_ on the top seven, or sleeping while anchored to the side of a cliff, which... was also on the top seven.

But despite that, despite having actually watched Sword Art Online as an anime, she didn't actually consider playing the game from aforementioned show to be that high on the list. The gaming industry had made leaps and bounds in the last year, but it wasn't like VR gaming hadn't been somewhere in the realm of possibility before that. Probably the MMO had been in works before that, too, at least in conceptional designs. And the odds of someone _really_ making the game match the show's best feature of _mortaliter fatalis_ was desperately slim.

Character creation opened a week before the game did, and she dove into that the moment she could, curious to see what options had been given. She knew she wasn't the only one-- she wasn't the only one who had seen the show, who had bought the game, who was intent on pursuing it despite the considered risks breeding fear in their hearts. 

She dove anyway, the world behind her eyelids slowly coming into focus as she hooked up to the system.

She logged in, first, her log-in and password flitting in front of her in a glow of righteous neon. There was space for a secondary account, off to the side, but she only had this one game game right now, so there was no reason to have more than one. It moved her onward, inward, to the character selection menu. She reached out, tentative, pale hands pressing [Start Character Creation].

The basics were easy-- she had designed the character a long time ago, knew what settings she wanted for the first avatar. Male, her height-- she wasn't tall, she barely made five feet, but she'd have enough body dimorphism with the gender, she didn't need it with the distance from the _ground_. She plugged in her own weight and moved on to the next section.

If it went like the show, it wouldn't matter what she put in, it would all revert back to the mirror image she had put under the account in the first place. 

She-- he, the avatar was male now, clothed in a simple brown pair of trousers if the reflection from the circle of mirrors was accurate. He reached up to a set of dials to change his colors; skin, going from his real-life pale peach to sun-kissed tan, and dialing the hair turning from black-brown to a deep, dried-blood red. After a moment of thought, he picked a bold red for his eyes, too.

Might as well follow the avatar through the actual character design that had been thought up.

He moved onward, a slide of basic armor appearing for him to scroll through. He shifted through the color choices, settling on a rusted brown tunic, a leather chest-plate over the top it. He'd find something closer to the character design in game; starting armor didn't have the most elaborate choices, barely had any stat modifiers, but it had exactly what he wanted in it.

+1% EXP gain on Sub-Skills. Stack with Cloth Armor.

Perfect.

Finally, he typed in the character name and waited until it stopped spinning, green, before finally relaxing.

[Confirm Character Creation]

~~

>> SAO Chat:

prowlingthunder: How'd it go?  
kokoro-daki: pretty good so far, I'M SO EXCITED  
prowlingthunder: :3 yes. Only a week to go!  
kokoro-daki: YEP. I'm already making plans  
prowlingthunder: Plans for... god-kicking boots?  
kokoro-daki: no, plans to go straight to the second town when the game starts, rather than grind around the starting city.  
kokoro-daki: do the quests around there, be bothered by nobody, that sort of thing  
prowlingthunder: probably smart. I think most of the chat will?  
kokoro-daki: we could easily do it as a group, right?  
prowlingthunder: easy! How many of us even are there, anyway? "enough to run a raid"  
kokoro-daki: yeah, about that  
kokoro-daki: wouldn't it be awesome if we got the first boss kill  
prowlingthunder: we'd have to find it, first  
kokoro-daki: there's more than thirty of us, it couldn't take that long, right?  
prowlingthunder: depends on how we leveled up  
kokoro-daki: yeah, good point  
kokoro-daki: man, it's a week away, and we're already talking plans for launch  
prowlingthunder: You know what'd be awesome? Making it through the whole game without using respawns  
kokoro-daki: pfft, yeah, have fun trying  
prowlingthunder: I can usually make it to level ten in any game without dying! As a group it'd be easier. Can't hurt to try  
kokoro-daki: but this isn't just any game  
prowlingthunder: Too true. But if we could do it-- that'd be awesome.  
kokoro-daki: of course  
prowlingthunder: So I refurbished an old character for mine. For group reference, I'm Prowling Thunder there too  
prowlingthunder: So we can all find each other :3  
kokoro-daki: ok, cool. I'll be kokoro-daki in game too.  
prowlingthunder: Smashing! I'll add you as soon as the game goes live, yeah?  
kokoro-daki: yep


	2. Awakening

Logging into the game was like waking up.

The gray loading screen faded to deposit Prowling Thunder in the Town of Beginnings, stonework stretching as far as the eye could see. The clarity was intense, the whole thing bright and pristine and, of course, beamed directly into his brain. Which was a thought that did not give him the hebbie-jebbies at all, no, really, not at all. 

But it felt real. The air was fresh and crisp, just a little chilly as the home server noted the decided weather and temperature and applied them to his avatar accordingly. It was nice, an added dose of realism that helped him relax into the digitized body, his brain catching up to the shift in registered center-of-gravity. Walking felt simultaneously right and wrong, a little off-kilter, like his legs were shifting in the wrong places, his feet landing in the wrong steps.

At least the ground was the right distance from his face. That helped.

He tested his limbs, stretched his fingers. The range of motion felt right, if _different_ , like walking. Fighting in this body...

Well, he hadn't really fought in the real world a lot. People ran roughshod over him a lot, but his tongue was silver and honey and barbed when it had to be, and the pen was mightier than the sword, when applied correctly. It could start or end wars, begin or end lives. Prowling had been good at that, in real life, and not so great at physical combat. A bow and arrow? Sure, he was... er. Decent. Ish. And he had always carried a knife in his pocket, among other utensils. 

But this was Sword Art Online. A game of swords, and dictionary-level romance, and not a bow and arrow to speak of.

The easiest and often safest way to kill something in real life was poison. But he had always found hack and slash video-games to be supremely satisfying in their own way. Fantasy games had a special place in his heart, and Sword Art Online had been... it had been fun, and it had piqued his interest as an anime, the theory and the applications had been solid enough, the implications had been better. 

Also sword porn. Moving on.

The game was waking up, though, finally. He hadn't been the first in the plaza, but by no means was he the last. It was going to become crowded soon, and claustrophobicly so, and he had zero interest of staying in the thick of it. He moved away to one of the arches leaving town, standing close to the wall to lessen his chances of getting stepped on. He should probably go and begin Trying To Fight Things-- boars, he remembered vaguely, boars were the most common enemy on the first floor-- but he had made a promise first, and he was a man of his word.

He dropped his hand in a precise fall, curved just a trifle, and the in-game menu bubbled open with a jolly little ring to announce it. He skimmed the menu briefly, moving over to [Friends List] with relative ease. He had read the menu a thousand times, he knew how to do it... it was just going to be a bit tedious, that was all. He remembered a few people he was supposed to add, and he knew they remembered more, and those remembered more...

Well, it wasn't like the whole Skype chat had even thought it was a good idea. Some of them had opted out, because seriously, what if? Some of them had opted out because the idea of virtual-reality gaming tripped triggers that didn't need to be tripped, and he had almost been one of them, honestly.

Death-game hissing paranoia aside, though, it didn't make logical sense for people to add murderous intentions to a multi-billion dollar industry. There wasn't any profit in it. There wasn't any reason.

Besides. Gaming companies liked money. Money made the world go 'round.

A couple of the messages were immediately accepted, which just went to prove he wasn't the only absolute fool to log on within minutes of start up, like he hadn't watched anime where logging in as soon as the game went live was a bad idea. Still, he slid his fingers over the toggle, flagged one of the buttons.

>> Group Message: Friends List  
->> Prowling Thunder: Woohoo. Look guys, I made it!

He waited for a response and skimmed through the rest of the menu, getting a good, solid look at each of them. Character display, inventory, the options menu---

The log-out that did not exist.

Well damn.


	3. Hogwash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prowling has some... issues.

_ProwlingThunder writes_ : So, if I die on the first day, blame the pigs.

 

 _This_ , Prowling thought, feeling the frailty of safety-through-distance as he backed away from the boar, _has got to be my worst plan since surfing down the side of Weathertop._

Which had been fun, but had broken his character's legs several times in the trip, and it had been sheer dumb luck the avatar hadn't died. But it had been a tense time, then, panic banked by the sheer, incomprehensible idea of _I've got this_. He remembered faintly, thinking this is a bad plan before punching the right keys to edge her off the edge. To think how rapidly virtual reality had punched into the world, made itself known.

The boar stepped closer, tusks gouging the ground. Prowling took another step back, fear trying rear it's ugly head. It had had to be boars, didn't it? Wild hogs, weighing at least four of him, with shoulders that came up to his waist. In real life, it could break him to pieces without really trying. It could kill him, without even noticing it had done it.

And it was all made worse, because he'd designed a dagger fighter for close quarters, which meant he couldn't stand at a distance with a spear and hope it impaled itself.

The worst plan ever. He regretted it already.

And yet.. what were the odds that the game would conform to reality's standards of murdering wild and horrifically terrifying animals? He considered the boar seriously. The vertebrae along the back... if he tucked the knife there, in real life, paralyzation. Not death, to start. Knives there and there, maybe, to the organs. Or there, using the eyes to go into the brain. Ala instant death. But the game had stats to worry about, health counters and stamina bars.

How had they done it in the show? Kirito had used a sword skill, leveraging his knowledge of the game to level up rapidly in a short period of time. He had known, in a way many players hadn't, the weaknesses of the early enemies.

Also he hadn't had an issue with pigs.

Prowling was kind of disgusted that _he_ had an issue with pigs. But he had grown up with stories of their dangers, even though his family had stopped raising them in formative years. There was a reason they were heavily regarded with wariness by farmers. There was a reason his family had gotten out of raising them, registering that perhaps a hog the size of a cow was probably not the best plan with a gaggle of youngin's running around.

They were like giant housecats, except not as affectionate in the least and nowhere near as small or as manageable as a cat, and also cats brought dead mice as gifts.

Hogs stayed penned because they wanted to, and that was literally the only reason. They didn't care for fences and they had the weight to go through them, and electric wire just didn't work, because they had a ridiculously stupid pain tolerance.

He very much did not want to do this. But they were the closest enemies to the Town of Beginnings; they surrounded it, thick and armies-deep, and they were the weakest besides, designed for brand new players.

To be fair, he had been expecting jellies. Slime monsters were usually nigh invulnerable in games, taking lots of melee damage. Magic didn't exist in Sword Art Online. It hadn't in the show, either, not until the fairy arc. But lots of melee damage to new players was like using a rubber ducky to beat on a wall; ever-fun, and supremely satisfying, with no long lasting issues except mild trauma from maiming a children's icon.

And he did so desperately rather want a rubber ducky to maim, right now.

"I am a moron," he told himself, out loud this time. It was a terrible plan, and it was going to hurt quite a lot.

 

It did.

 

Prowling Thunder limped back into the Town of Beginnings as the world's sun began to shift and set, knowing the nightmare fuel that was soon to come, if the game stuck true to the show.

The safe zone didn't immediately fill his life back to full, the way he rather wished that it would, but when he looked at his health bar, there was visible increases by the second, so it wouldn't be long. Already, he could feel the pain leaving his muscles. The stark red lines of injury were fading too.

He found a nice wall to hold up and pressed his back into the stonework, dropping his hand in the now-learned motion to check his menu. The experience points and money he had acquired were... not that great, but better than he feared they might have been, considering his situation. His nerves were not, but there were only so many things PT could do about that. They were on a live-wire and bound so tightly that he had a headache he couldn't make go away.

Tomorrow, he considered, poking at the surrounding map he'd managed to explore. Tomorrow he would head to the next town; not tonight, because like hell did he want to fight boars in the dark, and even if he started right now, if the game stuck true, he'd come right back here. Heading out would be a waste of effort he didn't feel like expending.

He found an inn nearby the gate and bought a room for later, before they were filled in the mad rush. Better to have some place to hole up and hide in when the panic hit, and even if there wasn't a panic, even if it didn't happen, he wasn't going outside the gates again until dawn anyway.

The NPC passed him the key just in time. He curled his fingers around cool metal, accepting it into his inventory, and then for a heartbeat there was nothing, the same way there had been nothing in the load-out when he had logged in. And then it came back to him, feet touching down on cobblestones again.

The shift from wooden inn floor to the Town's center courtyard set his teeth on edge.

Above him, the roof of the world bled red.


End file.
